The Deadly Space Between

by Patricia Duncker

She came to the back door, looked out and called.

  ‘Toby! Toby!’

  I neither moved nor answered. I stood, holding the rake, hidden among the dark yews, watching her. The bonfire was now merely a heap of glowing ash in the November night. I watched her scratch her shoulder and look down into her herb patch. Roehm was still in the studio, his back towards me, lifting her stacked pictures away from the wall, like a snooping dealer. I saw her enter the studio again. She spoke to him. It was like watching a mime from a great distance. He shrugged. For a while they looked at her paintings, standing close together. She lifted one of the white walls of ice onto the easel. Roehm was not wearing a coat, but a black jacket, which stretched tight across his shoulders as he leaned forward. I saw his profile, the heavy white face and clipped grey hair, as he turned towards her. She reached up and stroked his cheek. This was the first time I had ever seen her touch him. I flinched. A hot prickle of shame ran through me. I shouldn’t be watching this. But I went on watching. I stood absolutely still, leaning on the rake.

  Roehm turned towards her, just as he had once turned towards me, and kissed her, very slowly, on the mouth. The scene unfolded in slow motion, like a foreign film. I was transfixed in darkness, unable even to see the subtitles. The studio was fully lit, all her spots and lamps were controlled by the main switch. Behind them rose her latest project, a huge canvas, six by four, representing a procession of grey and white pillars, in which the white dominated. But it was not a neutral white, it was a rich, thick white impregnated with rose, yellow, blue. Roehm stubbed out his cigarette in something on her work table. She had her back to me. I saw her hair shimmer in the brightness. He loomed black against her white painting. But I could see his face, concentrated, calm, unhurried. He eased her jacket off her shoulders and dropped it into the cane chair. He was looking directly into her face as he undid each button on her shirt. I watched her head drop as she followed his movements.

  I crouched down, supporting myself on the rake, my grip clenched about its metal shaft in the windy dark.

  My mother’s bare shoulders looked appallingly vulnerable, stripped flesh against the black presence of her lover and the grandeur of her white painting. I had never thought that human flesh could look so fragile and so pale. She shrank to the scale of a mannequin, dwarfed by this man’s grasp. I stared at them, horrified. It was as if I was seeing her body revealed for the first time. His spread hand almost covered the expanse of her frail back. I saw his other hand descend to the front buttons of her jeans. He was still looking intently into her face as he stripped her naked. His expression never changed. He was speaking to her.

  All I could hear was the wind in the yew trees caressing the lost bank of charred leaves that had blown from the bonfire.

  She perched upon the table, leaning backwards. I saw the slit between her buttocks stretch and settle as she arched her back and opened her legs. She had her arms around his neck. It was as if he covered her completely, his darkness bearing down upon her puckered flesh, the two of them framed by the almost white canvas towering behind them. They became part of her painting.

  My mother was unconditionally naked and Roehm appeared to be entirely clothed. He loomed over her, monstrous. It was as if he had ceased to be human.

  I felt the moment when he penetrated her body because she shuddered and fell back, her shoulders hunched and twitched, as if she was braced against the force of a wave, crashing against her stomach and her thighs.

  I freeze, clutching the rake. I savour the shock of his body breaking over me.

  Suddenly the whole scene lurches closer, magnified. The lights glare pitiless above them so that he and I can see every crease and fold in her skin. As she pulls back away from his chest, her arms flailing unsteadily, I see one huge hand catch her in the small of the back; his other hand is in her hair. Her thighs ride up the man’s body, clasping him inside her. As he moves against her, pushing her open, forcing himself deeper into her sundered flesh, I catch sight of his face, concentrated, calm, unhurried. He draws back from her a little. One hand drops. She clutches at his shoulders. He is touching her genitals, watching her face intently as he does so. She is utterly exposed. She leans her head against his chest. I see her naked face for the first time. She is in pain. Her mouth is open, her eyes closed, her cheek a terrible unearthly shrieking white.

  The tears are hot upon my own cold cheeks, my breath is coming in unstable gulps, hanging in the frosty air. My chest is burning, a thudding, stabbing pain as if the air is being forced out of my lungs in violent bursts. I have been underwater for too long. The surface is too far away, we are rising too quickly. This must not end.

  I see the moment when she comes. Her whole body surges up against him, then falls away. He has finished with her. I absorb the movement of her back, shoulders, buttocks, as her muscles clench, shudder and relax. A plastic bottle stacked with discarded brushes wobbles and falls silently across the desk. I hear nothing, no words, no cries, nothing. All I see are his hands and face.

  I slithered down the rake into the wet slime. As I moved, Roehm looked up, straight out of the windows and across the rising dark lawns. He should have seen nothing but his own reflection in the bright glare. But he saw me. I know that he saw me. He was looking for me. He knew that I was there. My mother’s naked body and the shame of her desire for this man had been a calculated spectacle, a special performance staged for another man, the only one left in the audience, still there hunched on the soaked grass, abandoned in darkness, clutching only a rake for a weapon.

  4

  JEALOUSY

  Freud’s Wolf Man was a Russian aristocrat. He sought out the famous analyst when his neuroses became too much for him. I imagined the unhappy Count, journeying night and day across snow-covered steppes and arriving in the glittering capital, a world of operettas, chandeliers and diamonds, descending from his carriage and demanding the way to the house in the Berggasse and the small bearded Jew who held the keys to the mind. Did he lie on the legendary couch covered in carpets gazing at the cabinets of goddesses, trying to remember what it felt like to be bathed by strangers, kissed by unknown perfumed women, whipped by his older sister? How can you remember the sensations of infancy? Did the doctor ask leading questions? Did he sit silent, puffing on his solitary cigar, wishing his patients in hell? Did he pound the couch if they got their dreams all wrong? Did he doze off, bored with the second-hand clichés of memory? How, above all, for that was the question which obsessed me, did he persuade them to remember?

  Or did he hand them their memories, slice by slice, with the ultimate promise of a cure? That is, the ultimate forgetting. Memory is a pit of terror, haunted by the serpents of embarrassment. Who dares to remember? Memory is the hot burn of shame at our own cruelty and self-indulgence, the pitiful diminutive scale of our own desires, the admission of our impotence. For it was that corrosive vanity of men, the menace of physical impotence, which brought the Count to Vienna, rushing across the snows. He could only prove his virility on the bodies of indifferent whores. And he could only penetrate a woman in one unvarying position. She crouched like a dog on all fours, while he mounted her arse, his balls banging against her buttocks. Did women have to be paid before they would present their vulnerable slits to be pounded and buggered? Was that the problem? Did the virtuous white women of the Count’s world refuse to settle on their hands and knees, arses naked in the air, oblivious of the indignity? Was a son and heir beyond him?

  Surely this was just a curious, eccentric sexual quirk which made him an uninteresting lover. It did not seem to merit the dangerous passage across the snows. In his dreams the Wolf Man saw his ancestral family residence adorned for Christmas like a tinsel bride, crystal glass decorations spinning rainbows across the mirrors, paintings, carpets, a huge tree set with candles and wooden toys suspended from the branches, lit up in the salon windows. And then on every branch, alert, intent, he saw the white wolves of the steppes, watching him. Wolves, dozens of wolves, perched on
every level of the Christmas tree. He awoke, screaming.

  What is the significance of the Wolf? Well, in the primal tales we hear as children the Wolf is sexual, predatory. He slinks through the forest, stalking the naive and the unwary. He lets you see that he is there. He waits until you are addicted to his spectral presence, veiled by the white waste among the barren trees. The Wolf belongs to the night side of our desires. The Wolf is always male. And his victims are women.

  What kind of sexual crisis evolved in the mind of a man who felt the Wolf’s gaze upon him? In the symbolic Christmas forest, the domesticated version of the long slopes of evergreen, curving away for thousands of miles, the Wolves appear, en masse, untamed, their pale gaze intent, fixed. Suddenly the Christmas family festival is not a safe place in which we open presents, share memories, drink toasts, spend six hours sitting at the table. The family is not a safe place.

  The doctor in the stiff dark suit ignores the sounds offstage of his domestic arrangements pursuing their own rhythms, and persuades the flaccid Russian Count that he can remember the bars of his cot, where he has been swaddled and laid flat to doze, his stomach full, his arse washed and powdered. He is sleeping and content. He is not yet two years old. He is awoken by a strange sequence of yelps and gurgles. He raises his head and pushes himself up onto his stomach. On the bed next to him, horribly close, for his cot is always placed next to her bed, he sees his mother, naked and bent. She is crouched on all fours. Her mouth is open and she bellows in pain. Behind her, his face blank, insensate, is the man who arrives and departs, the man they name as his father. He is naked, white and hairy. The child watches the father’s purple penis pounding the mother’s arse. She screams, he screams. He spurts a thin trail of vomit through the bars of his cot. His mother’s red, straining face is unearthly, obscene. The child shuts his eyes and yells with all his force.

  This is the primal scene.

  But why is this more important than the fact that his tomboy sister dressed him up as a girl and whipped him for kicks? Or the fact that his nurse persuaded him to suck her breasts when he was only eight years old, while she pumped his tiny, bald penis in the faint hope of a reaction? Or did he once see the Wolf in the forest and never forgot the sleek lean silver of its swift, loping stride? How can you ever return to the world once you have tasted the wild saliva of the Wolf’s kiss? It was this that drove him mad as he tried on all the roles: as an army officer, a gentleman farmer, a bored civil servant, a Russian aristocrat trapped by his class in a historical catastrophe. It was his memory of the Wolf’s kiss which mounted the train alongside him and sat upon his shoulder all the way across Europe to the waxy museum cabinet of Dr Sigmund Freud.

  And it was this that he held back, even when he appeared to tell all to the splenetic little doctor whose fingers tapped irritably against the leather of the couch. For the good doctor was not fooled. He too had seen the Wolves in the Christmas tree, and he knew why they were there.

  * * *

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Freud.’

  ‘Good heavens, it’s in German.’

  ‘He wrote in German. It’s better in the original. It’s not very difficult.’

  ‘Are you into all that stuff? I mean, you’ve never read it before, have you?’

  ‘Yes, I have. Just a bit. I’ve read The Interpretation of Dreams in English. This is good. It’s all about the meaning of the Wolf. Look. Here’s a drawing of what the Wolf Man saw. Wolves sitting in the Christmas tree.’

  ‘How appropriate. I don’t mean the wolves. I mean Christmas.’

  * * *

  Christmas was three weeks away. We drove out to Heathrow. Much against Iso’s principled inclinations we had agreed to pick up Luce and Liberty. Their night flight from New York arrived at seven in the morning. But it was grim raining dark, and we had miscalculated the traffic. The M25 rolled along like an accordion played in slow motion. We doubled back, but even the last push coming down off the M4 was irritatingly slow. The lights before us were smeared with rain. We missed the signs and got stuck in the tunnel trying to find Terminal 4. The cars stalled, nose to tail. Iso had difficulty keeping Luce’s Volvo ticking over. Liberty had left the thing in our street on the grounds that car theft was unknown outside our house and that Iso could start the beast from time to time and save the battery. But Iso was still furious with Luce and hadn’t touched the car once. The engine sputtered, gulped, shut down.

  ‘Don’t flood the motor. Leave it a minute.’ She was afraid of seeing Luce.

  Iso swore. Nothing happened.

  ‘Shall I get out and run for it?’

  ‘No. Don’t leave me. If you do this thing will never start again.’

  ‘Well, should I push?’

  The engine gagged as she turned the key again and again.

  ‘Fuck this bloody car.’

  The Volvo burst into indignant life.

  We had to separate at the entry to the short-term car park where the queue had ceased to move at all and desperate late passengers began hauling suitcases out of their boots. I ran through the rain into the terminal building, leaving Iso to do battle with the temperamental Volvo. The arrivals board had LANDED written up beside the flight. Luce came marching out of NOTHING TO DECLARE with her cigarette defiantly alight. She aimed straight for me like a programmed missile.

  ‘Well? Is he still there? Answer me, you little beast! Has she chucked him?’

  I deflected the first attack. Most of the terminal building was a no-smoking zone. I confiscated Luce’s cigarette before a uniformed supervisor could pounce. He backed off.

  ‘If you mean Roehm, then no, he’s still there.’

  ‘Buggering hell!’ shouted Luce, sitting down abruptly on the caddy, which I had pushed as close as I dared to the arrivals exit.

  ‘Does Liberty need any help with the bags?’

  ‘Even if she did you can’t go in. You’re unauthorized personnel. Where’s Iso?’

  ‘Trying to find a space in the short-term car park.’

  Luce remembered her manners. She swayed to her feet a little shakily and kissed me.

  ‘It’s sweet of you both to come and pick us up. God, I hate aeroplanes. We’re sitting there in mid-Atlantic, suspended over bottomless depths, the thing isn’t even wobbling, nothing but endless black above and beneath and all you can hear is a gentle roar, and I realize that it’s stopped. It’s just stopped. And Liberty is utterly infuriating. She settles down inside one of those dark blue BA blankets with a little pink cushion and she sleeps like a baby. And when I shake her awake, convinced that the thing is about to fall out of the air, all she can say is, “Stuff it, Luce, you’ve drunk too many gins.” ’

  I put my arm around my great-aunt.

  ‘Don’t worry, Luce. Ten hours’ sleep and you’ll forget the flight. I hear that the trip was a great success.’

  We had received three conciliatory and ecstatic postcards.

  ‘It was while we were there. People in New York tend to forget who you are as soon as you walk out of the room. I just hope that all my negotiating won’t go for nothing. I need someone to go out again soon and follow up my contacts, someone to keep pushing the samples and the catalogues, force them to watch videos of the Paris show and then sign here, just above the dots.’

  She reached for her cigarettes again.

  ‘New York’s amazing. I feel as if I’ve been living at the same speed as the Keystone cops and now we’re back the movie has slowed down. It’s another world. They’ve heard of Europe, but they really aren’t that interested. We get the wrong idea about America from the ones that live over here. We think that they’re pseudo-Europeans. But they’re not. They’re all completely deracinated and traumatized because they’ve noticed that the rest of the world exists. And that it’s different. The ones that live in the US have yet to realize the truth. We’re aliens! What a shock! That’ll keep them in therapy for decades.’

  Luce lit up another cigarette with a vindictive f
lourish. She looked up at me through a little cloud of dragon’s breath. She was still thinking about Roehm.

  ‘Does he come to the house?’

  ‘Yes. Not often. Luce, you can’t smoke here.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Oh, how should I know how often? She has sex with him in the studio.’

  Luce smoked an entire cigarette before replying. Then she stood up and gave me a glare that would have mesmerized Medusa.

  ‘And you watched?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m in two minds as to whether I should ring the social services or the police.’

  ‘Luce, there’s no point. I’m eighteen. You can’t say anything to her. She doesn’t know I saw.’

  Luce suddenly exploded at full volume.

  ‘How dare you watch your mother making love to another man, you infantile pornographer!’

  Everybody within earshot stared at us. I felt surprisingly nonchalant. I had intended to shock Luce, and was delighted that my ploy had worked. The tale had the advantage of being true. I looked at her indulgently, as if I was humouring a mad relative who made scenes in public. My motives were obscure, even to myself. I wanted someone else to know what had happened. But my own view of the event had altered radically in the weeks that followed. I was no longer angry, humiliated, ashamed, but strangely excited. The worm of pleasure had entered my skin and begun to burrow and turn. It was as if Roehm had made me a promise and offered me a gift.

  ‘I didn’t mean to watch them. I wasn’t spying or anything. I was in the garden and they turned on all the lights. The entire neighbourhood was probably watching too. I was a bit freaked out at the time. But I’ve gotten over it. Luce, I see and hear far worse things at school.’

  Luce sat back down on the caddy. Her shoulders sagged. She was exhausted. A wave of tired excited faces began to pour out through the glass doors. We found ourselves surrounded by chauffeurs waving placards: BENSON, ARIANE PLC, GREY WOLF PUBLISHERS, HENDERSON ELECTRONICS, MRS S. GUPTA, pushing their block capitals before them like a bizarre Scrabble game. A woman in a wheelchair, being propelled at speed by a British Airways official, ran over my foot. Everything smelt of humid winter rain. Far above us the security announcements faded into a verse of ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen . . . tidings of comfort and joy’. Here comes Liberty with a spiky, dyke haircut. She has clearly gone native in Greenwich Village. Her huge hug engulfs me.